Bill Shorten is out and Anthony Albanese is in, but under all that Australia’s Labor Party has been through quite the weird two weeks since its loss in the federal election.
Factional disputes, a continuing weird refusal to outright state a position on Adani, and mutterings that Shorten is still going to stick around with another gig on the frontbench: it hasn’t been an entirely fluid transition of power, but such things rarely are.
On Thursday, now-Opposition Leader Anthony Albanese confirmed what the new Labor Party’s leadership team was going to look like: himself, Richard Marles, Penny Wong and Kristina Keneally. The rest of the positions look like they’ll be announced on Sunday or Monday next week.
Meet the new @AustralianLabor Leadership Team with @RichardMarlesMP, @SenatorWong and @KKeneally. pic.twitter.com/2sBYtrU7hz
— Anthony Albanese (@AlboMP) May 30, 2019
While Albanese has been quick to acknowledge his own role, and the role of Labor as a whole, in not delivering a party the Australian people wanted to vote for, Bill Shorten spoke today for the first time since the loss on May 18 and had other thoughts:
Obviously we were up against corporate leviathans. A financial behemoth spending unprecedented hundreds of millions of dollars on advertising, telling lies and spreading fear. They got what they wanted.
Regardless of what you think of the Labor Party, its election campaign, and Bill Shorten himself, it’d be fair to say he’s not really offering up a great deal of self-reflection there.
Tanya Plibersek is also out of a leadership role in Albanese’s Labor, but still remains in shadow cabinet. Earlier she had considered running for the top job of Opposition Leader but decided against it, citing family reasons.
Really, it’s all a matter of factions. In the Labor Party most align with either the Labor Left or the Labor Right, and shadow cabinets and frontbenches and governments are all supposed to keep that division in mind when being formed.
There isn’t much space for Labor pollies trying to shoot down the middle – just ask Andrew Leigh, who is not strictly factionally aligned, who looks likely to lose his gig as shadow assistant treasurer because he did not have factional support.
A big winner in all of this is Kristina Keneally. The former Labor NSW Premier has somehow negotiated her career into becoming part of the four-person leadership team that will head up this new Labor Party.
In the space of eighteen months, Kenneally has gone from Sky News presenter, to Bennelong by-election loser, to Labor Senator, to Labor’s Deputy Senate leader. Not a bad effort from someone who lead a state government which suffered the largest statewide swing against it in Australian political history.
Labor senator Don Farrell quit the role of deputy senate leader precisely so Keneally could take the job, adhering to Albo’s wishes that his leadership team be a 50/50 split of men and women.
Ed Husic also had to step down from the shadow ministry to allow Keneally in, writing on Facebook that he would be backing his “great friend” Kristina Keneally.”
“We need to ensure someone of Kristina’s enormous talents has the opportunity to make a powerful contribution on the frontline, in the Senate.”
Meanwhile the last Labor leader to be Prime Minister, Kevin Rudd, is being his usual heaps chill self by appearing on national television to try and dictate party politics. Of course he wouldn’t admit to that but also, like… come on.
Albanese, with his new leadership team now formed, defended the possibility that Bill Shorten will still feature on the party’s frontbench in another role during a press conference on Thursday.
“Bill Shorten is honoured as a former leader of the Labor Party. He of course was a minister in the Labor government. Our team is a mix of new and emerging people coming through, a number of people who have been selected today are new.”
So that’s where we are now, I think.
